03.2009 - 02.2015
“The Force is strong with this one.”
— Darth Vader, Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope
It was a fourth-grade classroom. The teacher asked if anyone knew where aluminum came from. I raised my hand and said bauxite. I don't remember where I'd picked that up. I just knew it. The other kids laughed — wow, how does he know that. It felt good. At the time, that was all there was to it. No one had made me learn it, and I hadn't memorized it for a test. I was just curious, I knew, and I was recognized for it.
That was my identity for all six years of elementary school. The smart kid. The kid who's good at math. What kind of time is elementary school, really. It's when you first step out of the family's protection — where you'd been sheltered through infancy and early childhood — and take your first steps into socializing, at school. It's when you meet friends, get close to them, get influenced by them, grow your dreams.
We lived in Daechi-dong, Gangnam.1 Korea's number-one district for private education. A place where the country's brightest kids and their families' educational fervor converge. At the time I didn't think of it as a special neighborhood. It was just where I lived. My parents were from North Jeolla Province; they moved to Ilsan, then to Gwanak-gu in Seoul, and finally settled in Gangnam in time for my elementary school enrollment. I heard from my father later that the move hadn't been an easy decision financially. But he'd made up his mind after my mother said, "If we don't move now, I think we'll regret it later, for our son's sake." It was a decision made even though it meant a harder commute for my father and a tighter budget for the family. I didn't know the weight of it then.
The first dream I ever had was to be a pianist. I'd studied piano for four years, so at the time that was my whole world. That, of course, gave way before long to the more practical dream of becoming a lawyer, though that didn't last either — I don't think I even knew what a lawyer actually did. The first serious dream that came after that was to be a scientist. I liked math and science, and becoming a scientist followed naturally from that.
Around then I liked chemistry more. I memorized the periodic table cold and devoured every chemistry book I could find. Then I drifted away from it — around the time we got to covalent bonding, I think. There was no explanation for why it worked that way. You just had to accept it. Math, on the other hand, was derived all the way through — starting from axioms, explained to the very end. I preferred that.
I finished the elementary math curriculum in third grade. Middle school math in fourth grade, high school math in fifth. In sixth grade I started preparing for KMO, the Korean Mathematics Olympiad. I didn't think much about the pace at the time. It was just the next step. Among the kids in Daechi-dong who were serious about math, it wasn't an especially unusual pace. My environment set my goals for me, without my noticing.
My parents never told me to go to hagwon.2 Going or quitting was up to me. That doesn't mean it was entirely my own, private pursuit, though. I was known at school for being good at math, and recognized at the hagwon too. I did it because I liked it, liked it because I was good at it, and did more of it because I liked it. I can't say other people's eyes weren't part of that.
The hagwons I attended back then all used corporal punishment. Hands were never dry from being hit.3 This was the early 2010s — that's just how it was then. At some places you couldn't go home until you'd solved every assigned problem. And yet none of it stayed with me as trauma. If anything, that tension seemed to push me forward. More than anything: I was good enough that I got hit less than the other kids.
Somewhere along the way — doing math and science, vaguely dreaming of being a scientist — going to a science high school4 became the goal. I read books written by science-high students and found motivation in them. A high school where I could pursue the subjects I loved as much as I wanted — it sounded like a dream. It was where the best math and science students in the country went, they said. So I wanted to go too. Whether this was a destination I set for myself, or just a signpost that appeared naturally on the path I was already on, I still don't know. No one forced it on me. But I didn't fully choose it either. To put it precisely, it was somewhere between my own will and the current of my environment.
That made KMO matter even more. Winning an award didn't guarantee admission to a science high school, but it put you in a considerably stronger position. Naturally, preparing for the Olympiad became my whole life.
My elementary school years passed without incident. I never caused any of the trouble other kids got into, and my grades were near the top. I was the model student, textbook version. After school and during vacations, I went to hagwon as a matter of course, and I was about as far from sports or the arts as you could get. (I'd quit both piano and violin by the time I was in the upper grades.) Especially in sixth grade, once I started KMO prep in earnest, I put more weight and effort into hagwon than into school itself.
Eleven years after graduating elementary school, at twenty-three, I went to a small reunion. Everyone looked more grown up, of course, and some friends' faces had changed so much I barely recognized them. But one thing hadn't changed at all: their voices. After just a minute of talking, I remembered everything — our shared memories, who they'd dated, their personalities, who was friends with whom. What struck me was that almost no one seemed to have changed, underneath, from who they were back then. Maybe my own nature, too, was already set by the time I finished elementary school.
Not long after starting middle school, I took my first math quiz. I solved one problem using an advanced method — the kind you'd only know from competition math. After class, the teacher pulled me aside and asked if I did KMO. There was already a kind of recognition built into that question. It felt good, even then. The pursuit of knowledge and being recognized for it — the two met here at their sharpest point. They were the two things that defined me in this period.
And not long after, the two of them would shatter.
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Daechi-dong: a neighborhood in Gangnam, Seoul, widely known as the epicenter of Korea's private after-school tutoring industry (hagwon). Property values and school-district reputation there are closely tied to college-entrance outcomes; families sometimes relocate specifically for it. ↩
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Hagwon: private, for-profit after-school academies, extremely common in Korea, covering everything from test prep to music lessons. ↩
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Corporal punishment in hagwons: physical discipline (e.g., being struck on the palm for wrong answers) was common in Korean private academies through the 2000s and into the early 2010s, and has since become far less common/more regulated. ↩
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Science high school (과학고) — a small number of elite, specialized public high schools in Korea for students bound for STEM fields, roughly analogous to a magnet school like Bronx Science or Thomas Jefferson, but with a more singular admissions track tied to competition results (like KMO) and interviews rather than a single standardized test. ↩